


mother, give your child a heart

by masterofesoterica



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:27:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1923264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofesoterica/pseuds/masterofesoterica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mother, he calls her. He is calm and his hands never shake. Vanessa likes the steel and chrome smell of his hands and his body—it is not like the iron of other men.</p><p> </p><p>Caliban finds himself facing Vanessa and Vanessa's demon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mother, give your child a heart

Mother, he calls her (just as that other piteous creature had). He is calm and his hands never shake. Vanessa likes the steel and chrome smell of his hands, and his body—it is not like the iron of other men. He is clean like the doctor, as clean and pure and unstained by carnal things. She thinks that the both of them are mere children who’ve glimpsed life only through the foggiest of windows—poetry—and never in its bright chaotic coherency. Poetry is a window too light and too dark in turns, she knows, there is no illumination in those pages of black and white. Ah, he is an earthly thing (she envies that of him in her more lucid moments). He has aspirations to a heaven that he’ll never reach; she can never again touch the earth into which she was born.

 _Mother of Evil_. She knows that he loves the sound of those words; they are rhythmic and they have their own ring of music and truth. In her waking hours, she too can appreciate the beauty in language—how sharply words cut into the fabric of a being and leave scars of unsurpassed ugliness (it makes her laugh and laugh).

He, out of all of them, does not recoil at her touch—nor at the touch of that other being who inhabits her body. Sir Malcolm’s skin prickles and he wipes his hands discreetly. The doctor’s hands are impermeable; she has never felt something so indifferent to touch. Even dear Ethan, that sweet atoning martyr whose past is dripping with gore, and so kind, fears her body (a vessel for a demon like his own). But Caliban alone never pulls back. He holds on to the both of them in that white body with surety and grace.

To him, that other being is still the poet’s archangel. To him, Milton had the right of it. Vanessa wonders if he pictures the beautiful young boy of Doré and Blake, golden haired and tormented and his white throat bare to the sword. She will not be the one to tell him that the being he sees as a brother and a twin is nothing like him at all. In this, she finds him foolish in the most endearing of ways: despite the cruelty that suffuses the tapestry of which they are all a part, he still believes in the capacity for redemption. Despite the blood that is tattooed in his hands, he still thinks to wash them clean. And for no purpose at all: he could not die a man’s death, wretched and cast out by his creator as he is.

She has forgotten what it is like to have even the mere wish of walking unburdened by strings of corpses at her ankle. Ah, Mina is there with her accusing eyes blacker than the shadow of a mortal being, dressed in the white gown that she might have worn on her wedding day.

Mother, he calls her. She wondered if, at times, he understood the finer points of mockery. Victorian ladies are, of course, adept at it—she is sure that it is the first thing they are taught in the cradle and at their nurses’ side. But of course, he had had no teacher and no playmate: he would not understand the timbre of mockery, or perhaps he had become so used to the tone of it in the unkindness directed at him that he no longer noticed the existence of its sound in his own voice.

Nonetheless, when he lays his head in her lap and his hair tangles in silent tendrils in the silk of her gown, she presses the sides of his skull with neither fervour nor malice. She fights that other voice that calls for his blood and the taste of his brain—that voice that demands an end to his human inhumanity (surely his is an existence that calls eternally for paradoxical death).

For Vanessa, it is payment owed. (For all the times he’s watched over her with those otherworldly eyes swimming in terrestrial tears—she owes him this touch of skin against skin like the echo of the mother’s hand on her child’s brow, a touch that is untainted by the knowledge of what is to come, a touch that is aspiration, and hope alone.)

Some people only have a future. Vanessa hopes that he is one of them.

One day, she lays out the cards and finds that he will not pick a card: his hand is trembling there in the air for the first time she can remember. She had thought they were clean, but now she can see that there are fresh crescents of red beneath the creature’s blunted nails. She feels a shroud of betrayal fall like gossamer around her shoulders. When she looks up, his eyes are once again wet with tears. He draws back his arm and shuts his eyes. A breath rolls out of him, and he becomes still and small and cold.


End file.
